Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Dax
Idon’t sleep.
I can’t remember the last time I actually slept.
When I close my eyes, I hear screaming; I see blood; I feel bones cracking beneath my boots and smell iron thick in my lungs, betrayal bleeding hot in my chest like shrapnel that never fucking came out.
Sleep doesn’t bring peace anymore — it’s war without mercy. No uniform. No weapon. Just ghosts.
And now, when I close my eyes… I see her.
The butterfly I fucking broke.
The softness I touched with hands that were never clean.
I see her mouth shaking with anger, see her eyes wet — not with weakness, but with whatever goddamn ache I planted inside her and then walked away from as though I didn’t want to rip my own skin off for doing it.
I see the way she looked at me — like maybe I was more than the things I’ve done, like maybe I was something human, something worth wanting.
And then I opened my fucking mouth and reminded her exactly what kind of monster she’d kissed.
I’m such a fucking coward.
I told myself I was protecting her, but the truth is uglier — I was protecting myself. Because loving someone like her means having something else to lose, and I’ve already lost enough.
The worst part?
I knew what I was doing.
I knew the second she laughed at something stupid, when she bit her lip like it held every secret she’d never dared to say aloud, when she kissed the mirror like she was leaving proof that she existed — I knew.
I was going to ruin her.
I should’ve left her alone. Should’ve walked away after that first taste.
But I didn’t.
I pressed her into that mirror like I could trap the moment in glass.
I kissed her like it was the last breath I’d ever take.
And then I fucking left.
Because that’s what I do.
That’s what war taught me.
Survival is not a love story — it’s a body count.
And if I stay… she’ll be next.
I drag a hand through my hair and pace the edge of the hotel balcony like gravity is the only thing keeping me from jumping out of my own goddamn skin. The city roars below — sirens, engines, laughter, arguments, life happening without hesitation.
Up here, it’s quiet.
But not in my head.
In my head, it’s still Fallujah. Still the red zone. Still blood on my boots and brothers zipped into bags. Still screaming in a language I never understood except for the sound of grief.
Yesterday, a phone call snapped me back into all of it.
Thirty days.
Thirty days and they want me back.
One more op.
One more lie.
One more shot at pretending this isn’t killing me.
They said I’m the only one who can do it.
But I don’t know if I have anything left to give — not to them, not to anyone, especially not her.
And still… still, I fucking ache for her.
Not just in my cock. Not just in that twisted part of me that wants to take her against a wall until the world stops spinning and every nightmare drowns beneath the sound of her moaning my name.
I ache for her in the way a soul aches when it realises home isn’t a place — it’s a person.
She looked at me like I could be that.
And now she’s slipping through my fingers like everything else I never deserved.
I squeeze my eyes shut, knuckles white around the balcony railing.
She’s not mine.
She can’t be.
Because if I let her in… she won’t come out whole.
And if she follows me into the dark… she might not come back at all.
But I still see her in every flash of light.
I still smell her perfume on my sheets — even when someone else is tangled in them.
And that?
That scares me more than any bullet ever did.
Because I think the war broke me.
But she… she’s the one I might not survive.
I can’t get her out of my fucking head.
I’ve tried.
I tried with whiskey burning down my throat like penance.
I tried with sleep — or the attempt at it.
I even tried with the blonde girl who crawled into my lap like she thought she could distract me, like she thought she could become her.
But she wasn’t.
I don’t even remember her name.
I just remember her.
Cassandra.
Standing there in those ridiculous bunny ears, tray balanced on her palm like she wasn’t holding the whole damn world together while she served drinks to men who didn’t see her as anything but something to take home.
Her red lipstick — not just red, but dangerous, ruin-a-man red — burned itself into the back of my eyes.
I saw her the second she walked out.
It hit like a punch I didn’t see coming.
All that confidence she wore like armour was fractured.
And her eyes—
Christ.
Her eyes looked at me like I’d stabbed her.
And maybe I had.
Maybe that’s exactly what it felt like when I let that blonde straddle me. When I sat there watching Cassandra look at me like she was swallowing her own heart and trying not to choke on it.
I didn’t deserve to hold it.
I know that.
But fuck — I still wanted to.
She was ten feet away and I couldn’t breathe right.
She wasn’t even touching me and my skin burned like someone had branded me with her name.
And that blonde?
She could’ve been anyone.
Scratch that — I needed her to be anyone.
Anyone but the girl I kissed and abandoned like I hadn’t wanted to destroy the entire fucking world just to kiss her again.
I looked up at Cassandra and, for a moment — a single, razor-thin second — I swear I saw her break.
Not loud.
Not messy.
Just a quiet, devastating crack behind her eyes.
And I’ve seen enough broken things to know they don’t go back the same.
I did that.
Me.
With my silence.
My lies.
My fear.
I watched her walk away like smoke slipping through fingers, and I didn’t move. I stayed seated with a girl I didn’t want on my lap and a drink I didn’t taste in my hand, pretending I could be the kind of man who feels nothing.
And now?
Now she’s in my bones.
In my bloodstream.
In the pulse behind every nightmare.
Now she’s the one ghost I can’t outrun.
What I did to her wasn’t just a mistake.
It was a choice.
And I’ll never forgive myself for it.
I don’t remember picking up the bottle.
Only the heavy clink it made when it hit the counter, the slow slosh of amber against glass, and the burn that clawed its way down my throat like the kind of punishment I’d been begging for long before tonight.
Good.
I fucking deserve it.
I welcome the ache, the sting, the way my chest tightens with every swallow like something buried deep inside me is collapsing in on itself.
I welcome the numbness creeping through my veins, the sick, steady thud behind my ribs whenever her name tries to claw up my throat and I drown it with another mouthful of whiskey.
I see her everywhere.
Every fucking blink, she’s there.
Standing in those ridiculous bunny ears with eyes too wide, too sad, looking at me like I was worth something. Like I was someone. Like I wasn’t made of the wars I’ve fought or the lies I’ve told or the scars still burning whenever I breathe too deep.
And I ruined it.
Of course I fucking did.
Because that’s what I do, isn’t it?
Break things.
Shatter anything good with blood on my hands and a mouth full of sins I’ll never speak aloud; tear apart softness like it’s the enemy; destroy anything that makes me feel like there might still be something human left in me.
And her face—fuck—her face when I told her to leave. When I told her she was a mistake. When I looked at her like she was nothing. Like I hadn’t memorised the curve of her lips or the sound she made when I kissed her like I needed her more than oxygen.
She looked at me like she was trying not to break.
And I just watched.
I stood there in the dark like the heartless bastard I’ve become and watched the girl I couldn’t stop thinking about shatter behind her eyes.
That blonde?
I don’t even remember her name. I don’t remember the taste of her tongue or the sound of her laugh or anything beyond the sick, hollow hope that maybe if I fucked someone else, I’d stop feeling like my ribs were caving in.
It didn’t work.
Didn’t touch the ache.
Didn’t even scratch the surface.
Because all I could see was Cassandra.
Her lips.
Her eyes.
The way her smile didn’t quite reach when she walked over with the tray, pretending it didn’t kill her to look at me. Pretending I hadn’t just gutted her with a single, cruel look.
She was breaking.
And she thought she had to hide it from me.
I wanted to be cruel.
I wanted to push her so far away she’d never come near me again.
I wanted her to hate me — because hate doesn’t grieve. Hate survives. Hate doesn’t get buried with the boys you never brought home.
But all I did was carve her deeper into me.
Another drink.
Another shot.
The world blurs at the edges — softening, distorting — but not enough. Never enough.
Because I still see her.
Still fucking feel her.
Like she’s under my skin, burning through my blood, echoing in the beat of a heart I was certain had stopped working years ago.
And I can’t.
I can’t fucking do this.
I grip the edge of the sink, knuckles white, jaw locked so tight I’m surprised my teeth haven’t cracked. My reflection stares back at me in the mirror — hollow-eyed, bloodshot, a ghost of a man pretending he isn’t falling apart.
“Fuck,” I hiss, the word bouncing off marble and glass and settling uselessly in the silence, because nothing is ever loud enough to drown her out.
Nothing ever will be.
I grab the bottle and throw it.
Hard.
It explodes against the tiled wall, shards skittering across the floor like the broken pieces of a life I never deserved. Amber spills down the grout in thin, sticky trails, catching the light like the kind of sin a priest would run from.
Still not enough.
I slam my fist into the cabinet.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Blood smears across the wood, bright and hot, and the cabinet cracks beneath the force of it, but even the pain feels too far away to matter.
Still not fucking enough.
Because she’s not here.
She’s not on the balcony telling me to breathe.